This is a topic that may turn out to have the staying power of “Mac or PC?” At least until Twitter does make money, or simply disappears in a 140-character puff of virtual smoke. The latest entry is a post by Aidan Henry on ReadWriteWeb and its title is peculiar: the “ultimate” revenue model turns out to “let’s monetize those eyeballs with ads!” straight out of 1997.
I think any scheme that involves putting ads into those 140-character tweets is doomed, and will send users running over the FriendFeed (or the latest interesting thing) faster than Twitter’s reliability issues already are. Ads on the Twitter web pages? Perhaps.
But “like what Google does, only really small” is almost always a losing strategy. Here’s what Twitter’s got that is cool and useful: a community (albeit relatively small) that uses it constantly. And a fantastically simple opt-in messaging network that operates across a whole bunch of devices.
So maybe that’s an angle for Twitter: let the individual users tweet away for free, but sell access to the infrastructure (and the people using it) for a fee. So, things like their recent work with Xpensr to let you tweet your expenses into their web expense tracking system cost money. If you want to send up a company or organization news feed that people can get via Twitter - with total control over when they get messages on the web, a client, your phone, IM, etc. - that costs money.
Then all the individual Twitterers aren’t a cost, they’re the fundamental asset of the company, and the more of them there are, the more valuable access for organizations is.